Heart of Style

Reboot -'- Immersion Part Deux: Eva Mendes Day Edition

2009-07-20T22:44:00.000-07:00

This is the second post in Heart of Style's Resistance:FoM-themed series on user immersion in digital entertainment productions. It is also devoted to the newly founded Eva Mendes Day.

Even though I'm not a huge fan of FPS's, I've played enough of the genre to tell what distinguishes this series from other titles. And far and away, the style of Resistance comes in at the top of its achievements no matter how you slice it.

What have we seen before? WWII shooters. What else have we seen before? Alien shooters. What have we not seen before? WWII alien shooters.

I guess the hook of the Resistance universe stemmed from this original creative concept. And unlike most games, Resistance doesn't use the plot/setting as an excuse to dump you into a load of alien scum with nothing but a rifle, handful of grenades, and two guided missiles to defend yourself. Everywhere you look in this game you see Insomniacs working insanely to make
their world as absolutely massive and believable as ours.

The most obvious way they attempted to do this was through the copious amounts of "intel" documents stashed throughout the game. Some of these serve functional purposes such as informing the player about weaponry or tactics (like a standard game tutorial), but some are strictly fluff meant to draw you deeper into the mysterious world of the game.

I encountered just such a brief outside of Manchester Cathedral in the game's most controversial level. It was an excerpt from a fallen soldier's journal chronicling the battle he and his platoon waged to hold the cathedral from Chimeran forces. No tactical advantages whatsoever. Well; I guess you could claim that it's warning you "Hey, there's bad guys in the next zone," but if you're playing an FPS and you haven't already realized this, then you owe me a substantial donation for using up our shared limited air supply in order to sustain your idiocy. The point is, Insomniac spent time, manpower, and money to write a “useless” piece of fluff that added more immersion to the game.

The artwork was another huge point of immersion. Not only did Insomniac use recognizable public locations to convey a sense of reality to the player, but also the way they decorated these locations stressed an extreme intent to convince. In one level I found myself running down the wartorn streets of Nottingham (or was it Manchester again? Sorry to my British readers), and I came around a corner to see a bombed-out brick building with a 20-foot mosaic painted on the exterior. It was of a motivational war poster heralding "Victory, With Our Help" in reference to the American-British alliance against the Chimera. The poster was intricate, a specifically designed piece of unique artwork to establish the game's setting and give it a larger scale. Similarly, I came across several posters for "The Beadles" in an abandoned home on the same level.

These are just a fraction of Resistance's expansive universe pie. Levels are loaded with unnecessary artifacts that are there solely for realism, from refigerators to books to cardboard boxes (that you sadly, cannot hide in). Soldiers you encounter in the game will spout out conversational tidbits that have nothing to do with your objective. The entire game is layered with an immense amount of detail.

The question is, was all that effort worth it? We'll discuss that in my next post. Stay tuned!

Reboot -'- Futile but fun.

2009-07-17T04:39:00.000-07:00

Today marks the first installment of a special series on Heart of Style studying the concept of user immersion in digital productions, with a case study of the Insomniac game franchise Resistance.

Resistance: Fall of Man. For those of you who don’t remember, it was one of the PS3's launch titles--a military-based First-Person Shooter set in an alternate history science-fictionalized Britain. The game, featuring Vin Diesel's unauthorized grandfather U.S. Sergeant Nathan Hale, was developed by Insomniac Games and struggled like a devoted St. Bernard to keep the platform afloat in the stormy waters of the Next-Gen console wars. Those familiar with Insomniac Games are aware that they created Sony’s blockbuster Spyro and Ratchet & Clank franchises, and that their CEO is also the last son of Krypton.

It's been well over two years since the game's successful release, and the successful title’s already reaped a sequel, an in-production novel, and a devoted online community. Given the Resistance IP’s success, I think it's worth taking a second look at where it began so that we can study just how entertainment producers generate and evolve new IP franchises the digital age.

When you first pick up Resistance: Fall of Man and pop it into that Space Odyssey-inspired Monolith you call a game console, you’ll notice one thing right off the bat: this is an incredibly immersive game.

“Wow, Devin. That’s quite a lot of praise you’re dropping on a simple FPS!” you exclaim.

It is a lot of praise. But what does it actually mean?

“Immersion” is a word we hear tossed around a lot in relation to DEP. It’s become sort of this amorphous blob of a word, encompassing anything that we don’t really know how to define but still want to advertise as generally good. Foley art produces realistic sounds—FOR IMMERSION! Users make customizable character choices—FOR IMMERSION! CGI boobs bounce with their own physics engine—FOR IMMERSION!

Unfortunately, strange things happen when producers try to create content with certain objectives in mind while simultaneously having no clue what those objectives really entail. That’s why we’re going to start from square one. We’re going to investigate just what immersion is, why users desire it, and most importantly how we can employ the concept of immersion to create better entertainment productions.

Stay tuned kids!

Reboot -'- Heart you in the face.

2009-07-13T20:22:00.000-07:00

Before I could ever bring myself to be so presumptuous as to unleash the bowels of my cognitive processes into the cold white porcelain bowl of the Internet, I would have to present a legitimate reason for so doing. A motivation, a factor, a purpose. An excuse to spend the hours that I should be working on my term paper for World History II holed up in a university computer lab clickering and clackering away at a keyboard covered with the fingerprints and occasional boogers of my fellow students.

Put simply, this is a blog focused on the field of digital entertainment production. Digital entertainment production (abbreviated DEP for short) is a new, hybrid industry that has come about since the adoption of the Digital Age.

Now, you're probably aware that entertainment production was a sizeable industry in urbanized nations throughout the 20th century featuring a vast array of books, music, film, and other entertainment media. However, the advent of new technologies such as the Internet and microcomputer in the late 20th century provided a catalyst for a new entertainment industry altogether, characterized by accessibility, virtuality, and globalization. That industry is what we now refer to as digital entertainment production, or the combined field of entertainment media productions created using digital technologies. Some examples of common DEPs are video games, online communities, eBooks, and even blogs.

Now, be mindful! The distinction between standard EP and DEP is not always clearly distinguished. As digital technologies become more and more integrated in everyday life, so too does the line between EPs and DEPs become increasingly blurred. For example, a motion picture made in 1955 would be considered solely an entertainment production. But a motion picture made in 2005 is probably at least a partially digital entertainment production, as it was likely edited via digital editing software, or maybe even contains digital special effects. Thus, in a similar fashion to squares and rectangles, all DEPs are EPs, but not all EPs are DEPs.

Due to the fuzzy nature of the line between EP and DEP, I can't promise that this blog will stay constrained to DEP alone. However, when I do careen wildly on a tangent into the broader field of entertainment production, I swear I'll try to do it in such a way as to highlight the vital implication for the entertainment industry's digital contingent.

In other words, this is a blog on my awesome experiments in the world of (Digital) Entertainment Production.

P.S.,
If you want a preview on what subjects this blog will cover, I'll try to give you a tentative menu:

-MMORPGs and the creatures who play/lead them
-Life as an undergraduate marketing student
-Websites and e-Communities
-10 great philosophical quandaries that can be solved by watching an episode of Kim Possible
-Drawing and art
-The political preferences of the average Angora bunny
-Bad music and why it's bad
-Frozen taquitos
-And nothing else. That's right. There will be no "And much, much more..."